Janácek's one comic opera is also the only of his mature stage works not to have cemented a place in the repertory. Though English National Opera did it twice in the 1980s and 90s, stagings of The Adventures of Mr Broucek have remained rarities, so Opera North's new production is a bold venture and, largely, a highly successful one.

Based on satirical novels by Svatopluk Cech, Mr Broucek is the most introspectively nationalistic of Janácek's operas. The title character, a 19th-century Prague landlord, is a kind of Czech everyman, embodying all his nation's foibles and prejudices. When in drunken reveries he embarks on two fantastical journeys – the first to the moon, where he encounters a society built entirely on aesthetic principles, the second back in time to 1420, when the Czechs won a famous military victory against crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, during which he is forced to confront the narrowness of his own world view. In both, the characters he meets closely resemble his friends and acquaintances back in Prague.

The satire can be applied a bit crudely, and the dramatic pacing sometimes falters but, as Martin André's conducting reveals, the score contains some unmistakably top-drawer Janácek, raptly lyrical in the lunar trip, martially assertive in the 15th-century one. With clever use of video projections, John Fulljames's production, designed by Alex Lowde, gives it all another twist too, turning Broucek himself into a 20th-century figure – he sets out from Prague in August 1968, with the US moon landing less than a year away, and, more ominously, Soviet tanks poised to overrun his country and trample on its season of liberalisation.

The updating is nicely judged, giving a wry humour to the lunar excursion and a real poignancy to the historical one, as well as injecting a touch more humanity into the comedy in the process. The same lightness of touch carries over into John Graham-Hall's beautifully observed and judged central performance as Broucek, complete with three-piece suit, briefcase and toothbrush moustache. The cast around him, playing different characters in the Prague scenes, on the moon and back in time, are all strongly projected too, especially Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Jonathan Best, Donald Maxwell and Anne-Sophie Duprels, all of whom get the English text across with maximum clarity. It's altogether a collector's item, well worth collecting.

• This article was amended on 13 October 2009. The original referred to a 1420 battle won by Czechoslovakia, which did not exist at the time. This has been corrected.